New and Old #183
Friday roundup and commentary
TLDR: this is very good, and every urbanist should read it, and there’s little here I don’t agree with and wouldn’t write myself.
This is good, and it gets at one of the conceptual tensions here:
I want to take a first stab at a definition: Disorder is domination of public space for private purposes.
In other words, things like littering, spraying graffiti, playing loud music, congregating on the street and doing drugs—those are the private purposes foreclosing a general public purpose. Some people will argue, though, that (some of) these things are part of the character of a city, and that being against “disorder” is imposing a suburban upper-middle-class attitude on the city. In other words, not everyone agrees on the meaning of “private purpose.”
Most people who tolerate disorder, however, just think going after it either isn’t the best use of limited resources, or is likely to lead to tragic encounters with law enforcement. There is also an attitude I dislike that goes something like, “My ability to walk past [all that stuff] and shrug makes me better than you.” This ignores the experience of women, the elderly, and families.
Lehman is certainly pro-police, but he treats it with nuance:
Police can deter disorder simply by being a visible presence in communities. But they also can strategically target sources of disorder, helping to bring it to levels where the community can keep it under control. A recently updated meta-analysis of 56 studies of disorder policing found that such policing consistently reduces crime. But some approaches work better than others. The authors note that “aggressive order maintenance strategies”—arresting people indiscriminately—did not significantly reduce crime. But problem-oriented strategies, which tried to identify and redress specific sources of disorder, had often sizable effects without spill-overs.
This last insight is an important one for thinking about disorder (and crime more generally). A large share of disorder is generated by a small number of people and places—one drunk or one vacant lot, one uncontrolled bar or one guy shouting on the street, can ruin the whole experience for everyone else. Identifying these problem places and people, and remediating them—not exclusively through the criminal justice system—can bring disorder under control.
Read the whole thing. There’s a lot more. If regular old Americans think that urbanism comes packaged with toleration of nuisance behavior and disorder, they will reject both.
Hurricane Helene Created a 30-Foot Chasm of Earth on My Street, The Atlantic, Chris Moody, October 1, 2024
I have been through my share of disasters: the 1994 Northridge earthquake in Los Angeles, many hurricanes in south Florida, the early months of COVID-19 in New York City. In those places at those times, the first noise you heard when you poked your head outside was the sirens, the weirdly comforting sound of first responders coming to rescue you or your neighbors in need—the modern equivalent of the hooves of the cavalry arriving just in time to save the day. But out here in the aftermath of Helene, separated from that lifesaving government infrastructure by impassable roads, mountains covered in feet of mud, and overflowing rivers, there was nothing but silence.
That sense of remoteness is not something I think a lot of urbanites and suburbanites quite know. I’ve certainly been in remote places, but it’s got to be different living in them—being hours away from a major city or an airport or the upscale chains that are the bread and butter of upper-middle-class suburban retail. Here’s an interesting Twitter thread on the geography of western North Carolina. It looks a lot like the coal regions of southwestern Virginia. All I can say is it’s quite unfamiliar to me.
And yet the communitarian ethos on display belies what looks like isolation from a satellite map:
Soon, cars in search of a way off the mountain began to arrive. We learned that Google Maps was directing people down our street as an evacuation route. Because there was no local cell service or internet, no one could alert the app that this path ended with a gap in the road the size of a tractor trailer, which could send unwitting cars plunging into the river. A Ford F-150 came tearing down the street, slammed its brakes and stopped before going over the ledge.
With no indication that our local transportation department was coming with a barricade, we built one ourselves. We stacked lawn chairs, stray orange traffic cones, tree branches, and even a blue playground slide that had washed up in the storm near the edge to warn drivers. John Barry, who plays piano in the local church band, found a downed road sign and balanced it on the other side of the precipice with sticks. Its words broadcast a truly understated warning to oncoming traffic: LOOSE GRAVEL.
Obviously it would be a mistake to romanticize this, because, in good times, it just isn’t needed so much. But I do wonder if people like me have a false sense of security, that things will just always be there and work. I wonder how we’d fare if things really went south. Do our relatively easy lives prepare us for something like this? Maybe—famously unfriendly New Jerseyans came together during Hurricane Sandy. But I wonder.
I am convinced that it occurs in cocktails too. Cocktails are stories. They have narrative arcs built on the juxtaposition of contrasting elements that come together into a pleasing, succinct whole.
So for this edition, I want to discuss why and how three-act structure works in the glass as well as on stage and screen. And there’s no better drink to support this idea than the Negroni, the ultimate three-act cocktail.
Huh. That’s a neat frame. (FYI, partially paywalled.)
Perfect Output is the first in a category of printer features that HP will call HP Print AI. Yes, it’s part of the AI marketing hype currently overwhelming tech users (don’t shoot the messenger!). According to HP’s Tuesday announcement, Perfect Output is supposed to make it easier to print things off of web browsers (like articles, travel documents, and tutorials) and spreadsheets in a cleaner, more natural-looking way.
One could use Perfect Output to quickly fix image sizes and remove ads and white space when printing something off a website, HP says as an example.
Cool. I just wonder why something like this wasn’t developed years ago?
Related Reading:
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Real cops and real teachers understand the disorder problem, but regulations and bureaucrats prevent them from solving it properly.
A very few people are UNSTOPPABLY BAD. If they are given free rein, they will recruit lots of otherwise normal people to help with their crimes. The few PROFESSIONAL CRIMINALS need to be out of society for life. Then the 'conditionally bad' folks (most of us) can be motivated by jobs and community.
Great to see an urbanism piece on disorder. I think understanding and working that problem is a bit of a skeleton key. Great piece/review in The Bulwark today as well.